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“... going to ring a bit hollow to anyone who likes these other series, glossy as they are, or thinks Hill Street Blues and LA Law are among the best things American television has ever done. I don’t really doubt the authenticity of The Wire, its proliferation of unpulled punches, but it isn’t good because it’s authentic, it looks authentic because it’s ...”

“... simulacra of humans that look like waxworks. This singular artist designed a house for himself, Hill Barn, on the downs near Mere. Orbach’s description of Hill Barn as ‘slightly French’ is unexceptionable. There is indeed an oeil de boeuf window. It belongs to no school, though there is some affinity with another ...”

“... a scholarship to Cambridge. Still, they have plenty in common. They take turns kissing a George Michael poster, read Jackie Collins’s bonkbusters and fancy the same bad boy, Hammad.Shamsie makes clear from the start that the girls belong to different parts of Karachi’s upper middle class. Extreme wealth buffers the Khans’ experience of everyday ...”

“... I will not name him. Within four hours of the explosions on 21 November five Irishmen – Paddy Hill, Gerry Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, Billy Power and Johnny Walker – were arrested at Heysham in Lancashire as they got off a train from Birmingham New Street which connected with the ferry to Belfast. A sixth man, Hughie Callaghan, was arrested the next day ...”

“... theme is the subject of reproduction.’ Similarly, although Wagner’s discussion of Fanny Hill is among the more illuminating sections of his book, it falls short of the analytical subtlety of Peter Sabor’s essay in ’Tis Nature’s Fault. Commenting on the abridgement of the original Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure to the shorter and less explicit ...”

“... chest, a difficulty of breathing and . . . a firm determination to encounter ten jams on Ludgate Hill rather than make another trip on the Underground railway of London’. Like mining accidents, the intermittent catastrophes on the Underground have taken sinister guise. There were hideous incidents during the Blitz, mostly kept out of the news at the ...”

“... This month​ marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Woodstock festival. Michael Lang, the tenacious 24-year-old who made Woodstock happen, has a habit of surfacing at Woodstock birthdays: one book to mark the tenth anniversary, another to mark the fortieth, a couple of namesake concerts and now a coffee-table volume of photos from the 1969 festival, plus brief explanatory notes ...”

“... police officers from the small town of Hull, Massachusetts, near Boston, arrived at the house of Michael and Carolyn Riley in response to an emergency call. Their four-year-old daughter, Rebecca, had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder two years earlier. When the officers reached the house, they found Rebecca sprawled on the floor next to her teddy ...”

“... vignettes like Chatwin’s, humorous and on occasion startling. The best of them are memorable. Michael Ignatieff watches Chatwin ‘like an old baboon’ under a mulberry tree in the south of France, having his hair combed by his wife. The ravenous Francis Wyndham and James Fox spoon up a pitifully notional soufflé made from wild strawberries which they ...”

“... zone’ modelled on Central London’s Georgian squares. The park was dominated by a grass hill, built from the rubble of the tenements and intended to discourage ball games. It recalled Boundary Estate (1900) in Bethnal Green, Britain’s first council estate, with its central green mound fashioned from the miasmic mud and mortar of the rookeries it ...”

“... on the poet’s overwrought nerves. The thread breaks off with a visitor to The Pines, on Putney Hill, likening Swinburne to the silkworm, Bombyx mori, because of how he munched his way steadily through his food and how, waking from a post prandial nap, he burst into life and, ‘flapping his hands, flitted about his library, like a startled moth’. Nothing ...”

“... well as a record label, bought the movie rights. The subsequent film, which starred Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, as well as Richard Pryor and Lena Horne, was a commercial and critical flop. But it became classic holiday viewing for many Black Americans, including my family. The Wiz is set in late 1970s New York, dingy and rundown, full of dilapidated ...”

“... and the Seventies, its colonial planning and allocations were largely intact. Cumballa and Malabar Hill, Kemp’s Corner, Breach Candy all on one side, and, on the other, the curve of the Marine Drive as it led towards Church-gate, Nariman Point, Cuffed Parade and the Gateway of India: within these loosely-defined parameters were situated schools such as ...”

“... of cigarettes, chats in a desultory way with the driver. They rumble through the darkness, up a hill and over a bridge. The cabbie wakes the household and Kuzmin goes inside, to be met by the housekeeper, and finally by Olga Andreyevna herself. She sets aside the letter as of no interest; she presses him on his opinions; he blushes as he speaks; she offers ...”

“... But there is, apparently, more competition for the honour than up the road at Bertorelli’s. Michael Foot passes by and nods, albeit ‘briefly’. Marcia Williams sweeps in: expect no nods from her. She comes under the novelist’s scalpel: ‘She’s an attractive woman, her face has a good bone structure, but there’s something curiously unreal about ...”